Friday, May 29, 2015

O. Henry poses the same problem for a history of the
short story as Bret Harte does, for as with Harte, O. Henry's influence far
exceeds his excellence as a short-story writer.
However, like Harte, O. Henry was the right man at the right time, a
writer who pushed the well-made formal nature of the short story to its
furthest extreme. O. Henry--a local
colorist writer focusing on the city of New York who so emphasized the ironic
pattern of his stories that his name has become associated with the formulaic short
story. O. Henry's popularity and his
output was unprecedented. By l920,
nearly five million copies of his books were sold in the U.S. Ironically, while he was being scolded by
the serious critics in America, who preferred the more serious slice- of-life
stories of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, in Russia, serious critics were
praising O. Henry for his mastery of the complex conventions of story-telling.

With O. Henry, the endings of stories became a
formalization of the kind of ironic reversals that Boccaccio had made popular
during the Renaissance. Boris Ejxenbaum
was one of the first critics to recognize that what O. Henry had discovered was
something about the short story that was unique and characteristic of the
form. In his brief study, O. Henry
and the Theory of the Short Story, he argued that the short story and the
novel were not only different but inherently at odds, for while the novel is a
syncretic form developed from collections or stories or complicated by manners
and morals material, the short story is a fundamental or elementary form. The difference between the two is a
difference in essence, said Exjenbaum, a difference conditioned by the
distinction between big and small forms.
Admittedly basing his analysis largely on the stories of O. Henry, he
argued that the story was constructed on the basic of some contradiction or
incongruity whereby, by itself very essence the story amassed its whole weight
toward its ending.

As Eichenbaum has said, there is something of the
structure of the joke about short stories in that they depend on the
ending. However, the question here is
why did Chekhov move away from the snappy ending while O. Henry continued to
make it his forte? This may be an
example of the usual prejudice against the short story or else a
misunderstanding of what constitutes its basic nature. There is obviously some
relationship between the structure of the short story and the structure of the
joke, but there is obviously an important difference. What needs to be distinguished is the basic
underlying structure of the joke (Freud may be the best help for this, as well
as Koestler and other students of creativity) and the use of this structure for
more serious material. Mickey Spillane
once said that the only reason people listen to a joke or read a story is to find
out how it ends. Thus jokes are closed forms with a punch line, whereas the
open short story (like Eastman's notion of open parable) does not focus on
closure in the traditional sense. I must
check Kermode here on the notion of endings.

O. Henry wrote so many short stories so rapidly that
he became the quintessential example of Edward O'Brien's accusation that the
short story had become a machine-made product.
However, his best-known stories are those that reflect the kind of
reverse ending that he was famous for: "The Gift of the Magi,"
"Mammon and the Archer," "The Cop and the Anthem,"
"The Furnished Room" and "A Municipal Report," perhaps his
most respected story. O. Henry is the
writer with which Frederick Pattee ends his class history of the development of
the short story, Pattee citing him as the master of "That reminds me of
another" story, but a writer, for all his smooth slick style, of no depth,
no thought, no philosophy, no moral complexity.
The problem of O. Henry is that he is a master of technique, and to cite
him as a representative short story writer is simply to say that technique is
more important for the short story than them.
This does not mean, however, that there is no thematic/structural
complexity in O. Henry's stories, as a brief look at "The Cop and the
Anthem" will show.

At the turn
of the century the name O. Henry was synonymous with the short story as a
form. And for many readers still, the
notion of what a short story is derives from the kind of trick or twist ending
associated with such O. Henry stories as "The Gift of the Magi," that
sentimental story about the poor young couple--he who sold his watch to buy
combs for her long hair and she who sold her hair to a wig-maker to buy a chain
for his gold watch. Not many O. Henry
stories deal with serious issues in a serious way; they are either sentimental
or else they are comically ironic.
"The Cop and the Anthem" is of the latter kind, but just
because it does not carry a heavy theme or a serious idea does not mean that it
will not repay a close study.

"The Cop and the Anthem" can be used to
make students sensitive to the importance of point of view and ironic
structure. The first thing students
might notice about this story is the language, riddled as it is with
high-sounding esoteric words. Students
might be asked to characterize someone who says "cognizant of the fact
that" rather than "knew," or "eleemosynary" rather
than "charitable." The
technique O. Henry uses here is to give the storyteller language typical of the
central character, Soapy, the bum, as a way of mildly ironically mocking
him. The language makes Soapy sound
important, and indeed the irony of his character and situation is that although
he is a bum, he acts as if he is of a high social status.

Indeed the character of Soapy is as important to
this story as its ironic structure, in which every action that he takes creates
a reaction opposite to the one he wishes.
The basic irony of the story is that as long as Soapy is "free,"
that is, loose in the city, he is not free at all, because of the coming
winter. However, if he were in prison,
he would indeed be "free" to enjoy life without fear. However, Soapy does not want something for
nothing; he is willing to pay for his room and board by going to some effort to
commit an act that, according to the law, will get him in jail. He knows that what society calls charity is
not charity at all, but that he will have to "pay" for philanthropy
by being preached at and lectured to.

The additional problem, of course, is that although
Soapy breaks the law, he does not act like a criminal. Moreover, although Soapy tries to be a
"crook" there are real crooks out there, such as the umbrella thief,
who thwart him, for he finds he cannot really steal from one who has already
stolen. Finally, there are those, such
as the streetwalker, who although they might not look as if they were outside
the law, are indeed criminals; one cannot violate the legal rights of one who
is outside the law.

Thus, Soapy seems "doomed to
liberty." Of course, a story with
an ironic, mocking tone such as this one, in which a bum who talks like a
gentleman tries to get himself thrown into jail but continually fails, can only
end one way. The ultimate irony of
course is that Soapy, who does not want something for nothing and who goes to a
great deal to get thrown into jail, finally does get thrown into jail for doing
precisely nothing.

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Tenth Anniversary of My Blog

Friday, Nov. 16, is the tenth anniversary of my blog. I have been taking some time off because I have been working on a new book on the short story. I have submitted a proposal to a publisher and am waiting for a reply. I will let you know when I hear from them. Thank you for continuing to read essays in my archives.

Now Available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle

Click cover to go to Amazon and read the Introduction and first chapter.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."